4 - The household economics approach

Summary

This group of writers has diverse intellectual origins and objectives. What they have in common is their concern with the social processes which underlie family structure (and, though less successfully, familial attitudes) in the past and, in particular, a desire to explore the operation of these processes through their impact on the family as a unit and on relationships between its members. They are thus attempting to tackle the last of what I suggested were the limitations of the demographic approach, the ‘family in a thermos flask’. And they are not attempting to solve it, as some demographic workers have, through simply correlating demographic ‘facts’ with a set of available community-level variables. Instead they start from a quite different methodological position.

This group of writers seeks to interpret households and families above all in the context of the economic behaviour of their members. Of the three groups whose work is reviewed in detail in this pamphlet this group is the most influenced by the methodology (as opposed simply to the techniques) of the social sciences (and particularly of sociology and social anthropology). Thus the questions they raise are inspired not by sources or by observations of the present-day family, but by social-science-inspired theories about the patterning of social relationships and of change in relationships. The main thrust of these theories involves attempts to isolate ‘structural’ constraints, arising from pressures often quite outside the consciousness of the individuals involved.